John Ruskin Quotes
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What do you suppose makes all men look back to the time of childhood with so much regret (if their childhood has been, in any moderate degree, healthy or peaceful)? That rich charm, which the least possession had for us, was in consequence of the poorness of our treasures.
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Levi's station in life was the receipt of custom; and Peter's, the shore of Galilee; and Paul's, the antechambers of the High- Priest,- which 'station in life' each had to leave, with brief notice.
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See that your children be taught, not only the labors of the earth, but the loveliness of it.
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When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own hearts blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.
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In all things that live there are certain irregularities, and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry.
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No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.
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It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.
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It is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture. No one knows, till he has tried, what strange beauty and subtle composition is prepared to his hand by Nature.
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You will find that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will, in the quickest and delicatest ways, improve yourself.
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You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter... you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.
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Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.
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All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.
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Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.
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You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
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They are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love change.
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Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.
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A book worth reading is worth buying.
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Men have commonly more pleasure in the criticism which hurts than in that which is innocuous, and are more tolerant of the severity which breaks hearts and ruins fortunes than of that which falls impotently on the grave.
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The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.
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The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.
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... Amongst all the mechanical poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it has given us at any rate one antidote - the Daguerreotype. (1845)
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Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.
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Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
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It was stated, . . . that the value of architecture depended on two distinct characters:--the one, the impression it receives from human power; the other, the image it bears of the natural creation.